MPlayer has the reputation of a stable, full-featured, flexible and portable audio/video playback software. The greatest thing invented since the wheel.
But I encountered an annoying issue on my very first day of my new project while trying to play a sequence of video files with MPlayer on a Linux box. There would always be flicker between the videos.
Fortunately, there’s a nice solution to this. Unfortunately I tried tons of options until I discovered it. The solution is the -fixed-vo argument. The best you could do without it, is something like:
In a fresh X instance (without a desktop environment):
xsetroot -solid black
mplayer -fs -rootwin -playlist some.m3u
This almost works. It only leaves a single black frame between videos. You can even restart MPlayer (to avoid a long running MPlayer process) between videos and the black frame is still hardly noticeable.
Of course -fixed-vo looks even better, as there is absolutely no flicker between the videos, and it works great with or without a desktop environment. That’s any desktop environment. The disadvantage, of course, is that at this point I’m not sure how a few weeks old Mplayer process that has played thousands of short videos will behave. Let’s hope MPlayer/XOrg can handle this…
P.S.
Here’s how my app invokes mplayer: it opens a pipe to the following command:
/usr/bin/mplayer -fs -fixed-vo -slave -idle -nolirc -msgmodule -msglevel demuxer=9:statusline=0
you can then write to the stdin of the pipe commands like: loadfile ‘/path/file.avi’
you can watch the pipe’s stdout for a message like “DEMUXER: ds_fill_buffer: EOF reached (stream: video)”
Now you know when the file you began to play finished.
